Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday June 18, 2013 @07:30PM
from the if-you-can't-trust-giant-corporations,-who-can-you-trust dept.

colinneagle writes "A recent GigaOm report discusses Verizon's 'peering' practices, which involves the exchange of traffic between two bandwidth providers. When peering with bandwidth provider Cogent starts to reach capacity, Verizon reportedly isn't adding any ports to meet the demand, Cogent CEO Dave Schaffer told GigaOm. 'They are allowing the peer connections to degrade,' Schaffer said. 'Today some of the ports are at 100 percent capacity.' Why would Verizon intentionally disrupt Netflix video streaming for its customers? One possible reason is that Verizon owns a 50% stake in Redbox, the video rental service that contributed to the demise of Blockbuster (and more recently, a direct competitor to Netflix in online streaming). If anything threatens the future of Redbox, whose business model requires customers to visit its vending machines to rent and return DVDs, it's Netflix's instant streaming service, which delivers the same content directly to their screens."

In Canada it does, back a few years ago [dslreports.com] Rogers was involved in throttling everything, even though they said they weren't. Took the work of a few very determined people who brought it before the CRTC, and were told to stop or face fines. As a fun note, Rogers and Bell Canada were two of the greatest throttlers in the world back then.

Nothing prevents Cogent from purchasing access to Verizon network. What Cogent expects instead, is for Verizon to purchase more network ports so Cogent can offload their traffic for free. "Peering" is usually mutally beneficial, meaning traffic ingress and egress is balanced. If it is not, it does not make sense to provide free access and it is fair to expect on of the parties to pay.

Essentially, Netflix pays Cogent as their "ISP". Cogent probably won that deal with their ridiculously low pricing. And now Cogent expects Verizon to invest in their network so that they can act as an extension of the Cogent network, through a "peering" agreement.

Probably necessary disclaimer: I am not in any way affiliated with Cogent nor Verizon. I do, however, work for a vendor of high quality networking equipment.

I pay an ISP, you pay an ISP, Company A, B and C all pay different ISP's.

It is the 5 different ISP's job to share the data load between them. Once you start having ISP's charge different rates to other ISP's the entire network collapses into AOLhell. Once ISP's stop working together to connect each other entire value of all ISP's fails. ISP's solely exist to connect tiny communities to larger ones.

"It is the 5 different ISP's job to share the data load between them."

No, it is not. The job of an ISP is to deliver traffic from their paying customers to other paying customers, or hand off the traffic to another ISP to deliver to their own customers. In this case, one ISP (Cogent) expects another ISP (Verizon) to absorb infrastructure costs because they failed to plan for external capacity requirements of their customers. Feel free to name your own guilty party here - I am feeling generous at the mome

Yes, it is. The job of the ISP is to provide their paying customers access to 'TheInternet'. That is still the promise they make, and still their obligation. If they can't meet that obligation they should go do something else.

They are using publicly subsidized infrastructure on publicly owned land to seek rent on a network they are not investing in or improving. So fuck them.

They are using publicly subsidized infrastructure on publicly owned land to seek rent on a network they are not investing in or improving.

That is the heart of the matter. They're so used to huge profits for next to no effort that the notion of giving customers value for their money never enters their mind. And they'd laugh at the suggestion of "invest in your own network".

There really needs to be some anti-trust cases brought against the biggest telecoms. Threaten to do to them what was done to AT&T decades ago. You'd see service improve everywhere in a big hurry.

There is a good chance it's more complicated than just this. Remember this is Cogent we are taking about here and they are famous for trying to get downstream isps to pay the entire cost of peering upgrades and have also been known to actively cut back on peering points with other providers.

They are also famous for causing most of the IPv6 routing problems [anuragbhatia.com] that affect day to day useage.

There is a good chance it's more complicated than just this. Remember this is Cogent we are taking about here and they are famous for trying to get downstream isps to pay the entire cost of peering upgrades and have also been known to actively cut back on peering points with other providers.

That link you posted was about Netflix saving people money by offering free caching servers, which are much cheaper than the bandwidth. Here's a free car, you just need to provide gas.. ZOMG, they're making me pay for the gas!

Oh, that's nice. They provide the servers (on *their* terms), which- as you say- are the cheap part, and want the ISP to bear all the bandwidth costs.
One of the links in the Slashdot story is dead, but here's a currently working version [techliberation.com].

Netflix- who have a position that is (at best) dominant and plenty of exclusive deals- were *choosing* to not provide access to customers whose ISPs hadn't signed up to conditions that suited *them*. Netflix say:-

Super HD requires that your Internet Provider is part of the Netflix Open Connect network. Please contact your Internet Provider to request that they join the Netflix Open Connect network so you can get Super HD.

But as the article points out

Neither my ISP nor the open Internet is preventing Netflix from allowing me to access its HD content. Netflix is choosing to block me from accessing its HD content because my ISP hasn’t agreed to host Netflix equipment for free and Netflix doesn’t want to pay another CDN to deliver HD content to my ISP.

Whether their terms are generous or not really depends on who you think is holding the cards. A company like Verizon expects to be paid for transit because historically they could demand it. A company wanting to interconnect didn't have a choice if they wanted to send data to them.

Verizon here is sort of a special case. They're an incredibly large ISP, and they own a Tier 1 network (though I wonder whether they exclusively use them). If they were a small ISP that had to pay to connect to a Tier 1 their

There really needs to be some anti-trust cases brought against the biggest telecoms.

There really needs to be a plan to shift Internet control from the private sector to the public sector over, say, the next 10 or 15 years. The Internet is now societal infrastructure and, like roads and water supplies, should no longer be privately owned. (If we'd done that with the telcos and the cell networks when we should have, things would be much better now). Private fortunes have been made on the backs of taxpayers while corporations enjoyed tax breaks, subsidies, favourable legislation, and access t

If we'd done that with the telcos and the cell networks when we should have, things would be much better now

How old are you? I remember when the post office ran the phone system. You had to had their phone, pay rental for it, you only had a choice of colors unless you wanted to pay £400 for one of six speciality phones, service was crap, international calls were out of the stratosphere and many other things besides. Things are a long way from perfect but if you want to see bad, give it to the governme

You had to had their phone, pay rental for it, you only had a choice of colors unless you wanted to pay Â£400 for one of six speciality phones, service was crap, international calls were out of the stratosphere and many other things besides. Things are a long way from perfect but if you want to see bad, give it to the government.

But they brought service to the rural areas, which is something private industry would never have done. They created that network on which you could make calls and made

Are you sure? Why is the traffic being routed to Verizon? Because Verizon is the optimal path for that traffic. The bulk of that traffic is gong to Verizon's customers or the customer of Verizon's customers. No one is asking Verizon to do anything for free. There may be some case where Verizon has a shorter path to another provider than Cogent, but that will be a small fraction of the traffic.

Verizon already got paid, by their customers, the ones who are requesting to stream from Netflix.

it does not make sense to provide free access and it is fair to expect on of the parties to pay

Verizon already got paid, by their customers, the ones who are requesting to stream from Netflix.

And now Cogent expects Verizon to invest in their network so that they can act as an extension of the Cogent network, through a "peering" agreement.

More importantly, Verizon's paying customers -- the ones who are requesting to stream from Netflix -- are expecting Verizon to invest in their network so that they can deliver the contracted-for services. The fact that Netflix uses Cogent versus Billy Bob's Bass Boat, Bait Barn, and Content Distribution Network does not really play a role here.

Verizon already got paid, by their customers, the ones who are requesting to stream from Netflix.

Not only that... if you are ISP, and you have enough traffic to Netflix; Netflix will provide a 'local cache box' to install on your network.
OpenConnect [netflix.com] hardware appliance.

Netflix pays for the hardware and such.

Large ISPs such as Verizon, can potentially put multiple boxes on their network, so they save cost and do not transport large amounts of Netflix traffic long distances.

Verizon chooses not too. Obviously, they cannot think their customers do not value Netflix.
Clearly, they don't care much about their customers -- or there's an alterior motive; or just plain ignorance, blindness, and stupidity.

Verizon chooses not too. Obviously, they cannot think their customers do not value Netflix. Clearly, they don't care much about their customers -- or there's an alterior motive; or just plain ignorance, blindness, and stupidity.

No Verizon chooses not to because they can't charge $100 a month for cable video in a free market with actual competition. Thus they stop delivering other video service over the internet eliminating the competition.

Verizon chooses not too. Obviously, they cannot think their customers do not value Netflix. Clearly, they don't care much about their customers -- or there's an alterior motive; or just plain ignorance, blindness, and stupidity.

No Verizon chooses not to because they can't charge $100 a month for cable video in a free market with actual competition. Thus they stop delivering other video service over the internet eliminating the competition.

GP's inability to spell should not have impeded your reading comprehension to this degree. We call that an ulterior motive.

Verizon chooses not too. Obviously, they cannot think their customers do not value Netflix. Clearly, they don't care much about their customers -- or there's an alterior motive; or just plain ignorance, blindness, and stupidity.

That's the question. We have a similar situation in the UK where YouTube and iPlayer are unusable on Virgin Media between about 3:30PM and 11PM in many areas. If you switch over to a VPN or proxy that blocks their internal CDN everything is fine, indicating that the CDN cache boxes installed by Google and the BBC are inadequate for the demand. As a result people go on BitTorrent instead, causing more degradation of the network.

There are only two reasons I can think of for this being the case:

1. Virgin Media is incompetent and there is some really lame reason like running out of physical rack space or network ports that prevents them getting more cache boxes in.

2. Virgin Media is trying to sabotage streaming video services in order to drive people to their cable TV products instead.

There's absolutely no reason I should be footing the bill for a service I have no intention of using.

You realize that a caching appliance for a heavily-used service like Netflix could save an ISP bandwidth costs, right? Presumably more than enough to offset the cost of switch ports, rack space and electricity.

Or they'd simply rather not spend time and money to solve someone else's problem?

You're looking at this the wrong way. The problem is their customer not being able to access the services they wish to in a reasonable manner.

It's not like rack space is free, or electricity is free, or ensuring that someone else's hardware isn't going to harm your network is free. If I were an ISP, Netflix would "get" to install hardware in my network over my dead body - simply because I DO NOT TRUST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE I HAVEN'T VERIFIED.

You do realize that the whole point of the internet is to connect to servers, clients, and peers of an unverified nature, right? And if they co-locate for any of their clients, they already deal with this issue on a daily basis? Go ahead and google Verizon colocation services, just for fun.

What about the people who AREN'T Netflix customers and DON'T want to pay for someone else's service? Why should my ISP fees be used to help someone else stream movies I can't access?!

Well, the benefit to their other customers would be that their connection to other servers outside of Verizon's network wouldn't be impeded by the congestion of their customers who would like to stream said movies. Keep in mind, the customer who wants to watch movies on Netflix have exactly as many rights as the customer who wants to play MMOs, or the one who wants to send emails. This benefits all their customers - just not their RedBox business.

If Netflix wants to solve this, they can talk to Cogent and help Cogent come up with a solution that isn't making Verizon and their non-Netflix subscribing customers foot the bill. There's absolutely no reason I should be footing the bill for a service I have no intention of using.

It must be a source of relief to you to know that all those services that you use are vitally important to all the other Verizon customers. Or just maybe those other customers' service fees pay for those services they use, on average.

Or they'd simply rather not spend time and money to solve someone else's problem?

Verizon's bandwidth is indeed Verizon's problem.

It's not like rack space is free, or electricity is free...

The backspace and electricity demands of an OpenConnect box are likely negligible in comparison to the overall strain placed on the network by Verizon customers using Netflix en masse.

...or ensuring that someone else's hardware isn't going to harm your network is free. If I were an ISP, Netflix would "get" to install hardware in my network over my dead body - simply because I DO NOT TRUST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE I HAVEN'T VERIFIED.

Good. You sound like a capable admin. Now, what's to say you cannot verify the box?

What about the people who AREN'T Netflix customers and DON'T want to pay for someone else's service? Why should my ISP fees be used to help someone else stream movies I can't access?!

By having an ISP you are splitting the cost of using the network among X number of people. Since the cost of an OpenConnect box is rackspace + electricity + verification / customer base, the cost to you alone is exceedingly low.

There's absolutely no reason I should be footing the bill for a service I have no intention of using.

There's absolutely no reason I should be footing the bill for a service I have no intention of using.

So if you don't go to Google, they shouldn't have Google or YouTube caches? I'm guessing they already do. If Verizon wasn't also a content provider, they'd have installed the boxes long ago to keep costs down, instead, they are charging you more in order to harm Netflix users. If you wanted the cheapest service, you should be demanding caches for all the popular services, even the ones you don't use. That frees up more bits for your use.

More importantly, Verizon's paying customers -- the ones who are requesting to stream from Netflix -- are expecting Verizon to invest in their network so that they can deliver the contracted-for services. The fact that Netflix uses Cogent versus Billy Bob's Bass Boat, Bait Barn, and Content Distribution Network does not really play a role here.

[BEGIN ISP REASONING MODE] Of course, it does. You see, Netflix makes lots of money. Partly, they make that money in a method involving Verizon's network. Verizon doesn't get any of that money. Therefore, it deserves lots of money from Netflix. What's that you say? Verizon gets paid by their customers and Netflix pays their ISP? *sticks fingers in ears* LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU!!!! LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA GIVE ME MORE MONEY!!!! LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA-LA [/END ISP REASONING MODE]

Bingo, we have a winnar! This is just another case of a large corp fucking an audience that probably has NO say or choice in the matter (from what I've seen unless you live on the coasts you get one ISP with a useful speed and the other crap, in mine its 8-20Mbps for cable and 3Mbps for DSL) because God fucking forbid they actually provide what they were fricking PAID FOR by those customers instead of trying to fuck them for every cent they can squeeze!

What will happen is the vast majority, which don't read tech sites and most likely will never hear a word of this from their corporate kissing local MSM, will try to use netflix only to get a stuttering mess. They will say "Oh Netflix sucks" because they won't have any way of knowing its their ISP that is MAKING it suck so they will have to use the alternative...which is owned by Verizon who will make that much more money off all those people that have to use Redbox instead of the service they originally wanted to.

This is why we frankly shouldn't allow any company that owns ISPs to own content as they will always end up tilting things in favor of their content. Of course with our government being such corporate whores that every politician gets a free set of kneepads i doubt shit will be done, but that is why our prices put us in the top 5 but the quality and speed puts us behind countries like Romania.

If Verizon cared about its customers it would make sure it had the best possible access to content, instead they built the cheapest network access they could get without investing in their infrastructure.

"Peering" is usually mutally beneficial, meaning traffic ingress and egress is balanced. I

No: settlement-free peering is usually mutually beneficial, meaning the benefit to both parties of the relationship is larger than the cost.

Traffic ratios are almost irrelevent. Although, they are commonly used for negotiation purposes.

Pushing more traffic into Verizon's network than you pull, means that Verizon's users are requesting data from you.

If Verizon were not a monopoly; there is no question that this would be mutually beneficial --- if there is poor connectivity to Netflix, or greater latency / worse performance, then competing providers would be favorable for subscribers.

Better connectivity to Netflix is beneficial for an ISP; moreso, than the cost of some extra ports.

You're assuming Verizon has viable competition to fear. Alas, there is really no competition for FiOS, at least in this area, so they have no fear. Where are we going to go, the cable company? Like they're any happier about Netflix eating their lunch.

Pushing more traffic into Verizon's network than you pull, means that Verizon's users are requesting data from you.

Umm, no it doesn't. We're not talking about last-mile links here, we're talking about backbone. If I'm Cogent, and I need to get traffic from San Francisco to New York, I can dump that on Verizon's network (or anyone else I'm peering with) and their network will dutifully forward the traffic all the way to NY. The end-point could be AT&T, Comcast, or even another Cogent customer, but du

Other ISPs have already setup their own CDNs for netflix because it's simply cheaper. Verizon is in direct competition with netflix now with Redbox's streaming service.

I have comcast. Trying using netflix on your cable modem with and without comcast DNS servers. When using OpenDNS, the streams are stalled for minutes. Using comcasts own DNS servers, the streams start quickly.

Essentially, Netflix pays Cogent as their "ISP". Cogent probably won that deal with their ridiculously low pricing. And now Cogent expects Verizon to invest in their network so that they can act as an extension of the Cogent network, through a "peering" agreement.

And there is a whole lot of individuals who pay Verizon for internet access including access to Netflix. That traffic is going over Verizon's network because Verizon customers who are paying Verizon for that network traffic are requesting it.

The part you seem to be missing here is that Netflix is eating into Verizon's ability to charge obscene rates of $100 a month just to watch movies. Cause, you see, it use to be paying customers had very limited options for accessing video therefore allowing cable TV com

Nothing prevents Cogent from purchasing access to Verizon network. What Cogent expects instead, is for Verizon to purchase more network ports so Cogent can offload their traffic for free.

So what am I, as a Verizon DSL subscriber, buying? In the old days, the subscriber fees paid for peering, and peers were bought based on demand, not punishing companies who do business with competitors.

If that traffic is bound for Verizon customers, then no. It is not any sort of freeloading to hand a network traffic bound for one of it's customers. Why would Cogent want to pay to give Verizon's customers the packets that they requested and that Verizon has already been paid to deliver?

In a free and healthy market, Cogent would say "fine, no packets for you" and then laugh as Verizon's customers jumped ship. Alas, it is not a healthy free market and many of Verizon's customers have nowhere to jump to.

If memory serves, this is a typical pattern for Cogent. Rather than paying for additional bandwidth as they are contractually obligated to do, they complain loudly in the media and make wild accusations.

I suspect nothing is preventing Cogent from paying for the excess transit. They just don't wanna.

I can come at this from a slightly different angle. I'm very familiar with interconnect billing practices between ILECs/CLECs/CAPs/CMRS etc.

The issue here is purely Verizon's fault. Verizon's customers are wanting traffic off of Cogent's network. Verizon is obligated to buy ports (Internet Drains in LEC parlance) with a min commit (usually 5gb or so at 2-5 dollars per MB) and billing generally based on hourly samples of usage and then taking the 95th percentile band. There may or may not be a separate acces

Well, depends what you mean by "internet service". In this case, the basic problem is that Netflix streaming accounts for 1/3 of all the traffic on the internet, and "peering" assumes roughly equal sharing in both directions. The whole peering issues with Netflix has been going on for years... it's too bad the article doesn't put it in context and oversimplifies.

With peering to ISPs it isn't about equal traffic in both directions, that is more when Tier 1 companies peer.

ISPs usually peer because it is cheaper and/or faster than paying to send the same traffic over the regular internet.Over here in Australia most ISPs peer with PIPE. PIPE does not provide any internet access, just traffic between peers.The ISPs consequently get nearly free data from Google, Akamai, etc... just by setting up the one peering connection which is unlimited.

With peering to ISPs it isn't about equal traffic in both directions, that is more when Tier 1 companies peer.

Actually... "traffic ratios" are more about what large ISPs use as a tool to prevent smaller ISPs from peering with them settlement-free, as a substitute from purchasing transit.

Other than traffic ratios are an illustrative tool, that beancounters can understand.
They kind of fall apart in a sense, when there are "one of a kind" destinations that aren't on your network -- that your own subscr

There are but they were pretty well gutted back in the days of the Reagan Administration. Now, the ones that are left are mainly ignored. The big exceptions, like the Microsoft case, usually come as political punishment or when the infraction is so blatant that it cannot be ignored.

If we had a Justice Department that was more than a bunch of cronies and amateurs, there wouldn't be a single telecom with any interest in content providers, and there certainly would not have been any of the mega-mergers in the airline industry and others.

We haven't had a real Justice Department since before the days of Ed Meese. Meese is really the very model of the modern attorney general, who believes his main job is to make sure no rich people get in any trouble and to find ways to subvert the Constitution.

It used to be that the FCC strictly forbid the content CARRIERS (telephone, cable, satellite) from being content PROVIDERS, too. But not very long ago they seem to have dropped that regulation.

And look at the results. We are already seeing some pretty terrible negative effects. Carriers should never be allowed to be in the business of providing content. It's just plain a bad idea, and the consequences are pretty easy to predict. Hell, we don't even have to predict. It's already hindsight.

Verizon in this case is the physical plant provider, and, contrary to every notion about how markets work, governments enforce monopolies there. We have hundred-year-old cronyism still dragging us down today. Statists are then shocked to find the providers aren't competing on service quality when they have no competition.

In the not-too-distant future we'll have a majority of people happy to have both DSL and CableTV-derived pure-IP networks availabl

This wouldn't be the first time people have had issues with Cogent having saturated peering links. A common complaint among Cox customers is that latency is high to certain WoW servers, and saturated Cogent links has been found to be the cause - and they don't seem particularly interested in fixing it.

Verizon doesn't "choose" ISPs; they _are_ a backbone provider (they don't buy transit from anybody). Cogent is known for peering disputes, as well as selling hard to content providers (and sometimes eyeball networks) they think will give them leverage in peering disputes.

Smaller ISPs (that do buy transit) know that you don't buy from Cogent unless you have at least two other paths to everything on the Internet.

Why open your mouth when you don't know what you are talking about? You did know that you didn't know what you were talking about, right? Right? yeah.. you did...

Verizon is a tier 1 provider.
Cogent acts like a tier 1 provider, but isn't.

Cogent has run into this "problem" more than once, and more than a few times it was before Netflix used them as a provider. The problem is that Cogent dumps data onto other peoples networks as fast as possible, even when its a significantly longer route than if they had moved the data themselves most of the way.

The only reason that any of the tier 1 providers put up with Cogent at all is because Cogent landed quite a few CDN deals that people feel are important, and they landed those deals by offering a lower cost that was only enabled by their bad faith routing practices.

The problem is that Cogent dumps data onto other peoples networks as fast as possible, even when its a significantly longer route than if they had moved the data themselves most of the way.

I remember when AT&T got bagged for that. In fact, they were dumping traffic on to others when the final destination was AT&T. A sub in FL going to a sub in CA would leave AT&T network and re-enter because the cheap bastards were 10 times worse than anything you are accusing others of.

Except that Cogent earns sympathy for taking advantage of the real Tier 1's because the real Tier 1's only exist because of crony capitalistic efforts, and bullshit shenanigans that makes Cogent's shenanigans look like your dad's dick.

Quite small.

Tier 1's primarily exist because they were their first and had to invest in the market before there was really a market there to invest in. All Tier 1's have been around for a very long time (in the computer world). Cogents and others are relatively new to the market, so they simply don't have the infrastructure that the Tier 1's do. Could they build it? Yes; but for the moment they don't want to incur those very costly expenses.

I know when my Netflix stuff starts throttling (not saying it's intentional by my cable co) I just sit and watch slightly more pixelated versions of whatever I was watching at the time. My last reaction is "Dammit, gotta get my ass off the couch, pants on, get in car, drive to Redbox, get disc, watch disc, remember to go back to Redbox and return disc because that's a lot less hassle."

But Redbox has a streaming service now. Coincidentally, it's owned by Verizon. But I'm sure Verizon doing this in no way is a plot to make people think Netflix is horrible and Redbox Streaming is wonderful. I'm positive that they're not trying to leverage their network to benefit one of their unrelated services over a competitor. After all, big companies are owned by good, kind-hearted people who only seek to make as many people happy as possible. (Also, the sky is the most beautiful shade of orange in the world I live in.)

Whenever I get issues with content delivery, I call the tech dept of my ISP. If they fail to fix it, I become part of the churn data. This is why I am no longer a Comcast customer. They were caught dropping connections and bringing some services to a standstill.

My last slowdown with my current provider wasn't their fault. A neighbor cracked my older weak encryption and saturated my connection. It pays to check your router's lights. Changed SSID, encryption, and password and the problem was fixed on th

My problem is that I can't become part of the churn data because I live in an area where there's ONE broadband ISP (Time Warner Cable). I could go with Verizon DSL, but they're ditching their DSL service as quickly as they can and I'm not jumping onto a service like that. FIOS doesn't reach into my neighborhood. (I'm not in a rural area. They just stopped their build out before they reached my house.) So if I ever have a major problem with Time Warner Cable's Internet service (like if they instituted th

I wouldn't put it past Verizon to do that but one of my colo's peers primarily with Cogent and Cogent blows up internet connectivity from that colo all the time, an issue I just don't have in my other colo. Honestly I don't think Cogent has the moral authority to be able to assert anything.

Cogent is well known for undercutting the market to acquire another networks eyeballs, and then sending all that traffic into the networks they have settlement free peering agreements with. That kind of dick move means nobody wants to turn up settlement free links with you. Verizon's no angel either, but they're merely the latest to disagree with Cogent about what constitutes polite use of the access to their network.

More likely YouTube, too, is being throttled or at least left in a state of benign neglect. Verizon FiOS, supposedly to be the fastest anywhere, consistently has trouble delivering YouTube videos. I work on many different networks and peering points but the only one that has trouble with YouTube is Verizon FiOS. Even if the YouTube video is serving from a local edge server (Ashburn) it will pause within the first twenty seconds each and every time.

Oddly enough, and likely because we are only down the road from AWS-East, we never have trouble with Netflix or Amazon Instant Video on our FiOS connection.

Cox never had any sort of problem but that might be a lack of customers since FiOS came into town.

Yep. I'm a Comcast customer in a metropolitan area of Northern California.

I used a *nix tool to get the actual URL that the Youtube player uses to download the video that's being streamed to it and used wget to fetch the video file. On my wired home connection, the first fifteen or twenty seconds of the video transferred at ~2MBps, the remainder transferred at ~100KBps. When fetching the resource at that very same URL from a machine at a university in Alabama, the *entire* video transferred at a constant 14

I wish you weren't A/C it would be nice if you could try this and respond again!

Anyway..

Your experiment doesn't necessarily show they are deprioritizing Youtube. It could be that they are deprioritizing large downloads in genreal. It actually kind of makes sense to do so. You have 100s of thousands of people trying to get millions of files all at the same time. Many are tiny little files that could be transfered nearly in an instant. Some are huge plus will take a while. It makes sense to let those ti

YouTube is also hit or miss for me. Sometimes it'll work fine, other times I get the dreaded 10-20 seconds of video, then wait, wait, wait... forget it; close the tab. I'm on a 50mb/s Time-Warner connection in North Carolina, FWIW.

This is an example of a "natural monopoly", where a limited community resource is owned as property by a corporation. In this case it's the easements and permission needed to run the phone lines, and the RF spectrum for cell-phone service.

If you treat the resource as property, you get the situation we have now: high fees for access and discouraged use. Phone service has high monthly fees (access) as well as data caps, fixed monthly "minutes", and roaming charges (discouraged use). Similarly for internet: high monthly fees (access), data caps, throttling, kicking off high-usage users, and so on (discouraged use).

As an alternative, take the revenues from the carriers and divide by the total minutes of service. I don't know what that figure actually is, but for purposes of discussion let's say it's 5 cents a minute. A similar calculation can be done per gigabyte of internet data.

Suppose the government mandated that carriers could only charge that amount or less, with no other restrictions. Any phone could be used with any carrier, and you choose a carrier at call time by scanning the available carriers like we scan wireless access points. (You wouldn't explicitly scan for each call. Most likely you choose one carrier as default, like we now do with wireless access points.)

Now instead of making money by getting people to sign up and not use the service, carriers make money the more people use the service. They have to encourage more people to use it, and for longer periods. They have an interest in putting unused capacity to work, and promoting innovative new uses. If a channel is overallocated, they have an interest in building out more capacity.

The reasoning can be applied to cable TV, internet, and phone service. If the cable company can only charge 15 cents per hour of viewing/downloading (whatever the fee structure works out as), then they will encourage more usage rather than throttling.

If this change is made, the existing players will make the same profit as now: initially the profits are the same, and no workers need be laid off. Their bottom line doesn't change, only their focus of service.

It's game theory: change the rules so that the outcome is more desirable.

And peering is like agreeing to allow guests to use your toilet as long as you are allowed to use theirs.

Okay. Fine.

But what Cogent does after making this agreement with its neighbors is open up a buffet next door with a big sign directing its customers to your bathroom. Then when their customers complain about the backups and stink, Cogent demands you build more toilets.

Except Verizon actually owns the parking lot at the buffet - so to even get in, the customers have to pay for parking in the first place. Verizon is still not providing what their own customers are paying them for.

There are reasons for throttling bandwidth. Entirely reasonable and practical reasons for it... and I wouldn't get in the way of ISPs from doing that. But they can't take advantage of that understanding to exploit people or undermine services using their bandwidth.

Please... do not make us take your flexibility away ISPs. Because if you start messing with this we will do it.

I work for a telco, and not too long ago I got to chat with one of our VPs about why this happens. I'm a total net neutrality guy, but after talking to him I understood his point of view a bit better.

With most large content providers, like google for example, ISPs can go to them and say "hey, we're getting a lot of traffic from you. It's cheaper for us if we can make arrangements that are beneficial to the both of us." and then the ISP and the content provider enter into an agreement where the ISP pays a bulk rate for trunks to a network, and the content provider remains on that network and gives plenty of warning before switching so the ISP can make sure that they have enough capacity in that direction.

Netflix however, doesn't make these kind of agreements. The switch providers and hosting at will. The ISP will pay for large trunks leading to where the majority of netflix traffic is coming from and then Netflix will suddenly drop that host and switch to another. Suddenly 20% of the ISPs traffic is coming from an entirely new network. But they are still locked into a contract with that other network.

Also, Netflix has no interest in the health of the ISPs network. If Netflix had a financial interest in the health of the network they could do some rather simple things to help the isp, like encourage users to queue up movies ahead of time, have them download at off peak times and then play when they wanted to watch them. This is was cable companies do after all... but netflix has no interest in this sort of thing and as far as the ISP is concerned is doing is best to be as damaging to the network as possible.

I'm still all for net neutrality, but its good to understand the ISPs concerns. They aren't just out to thwart Netflix. But Netflix is digging their own grave on this one.

Ok, if Verizon is intentionally slowing down Netflix, something like putting a delay on the transmission of packets or throwing away a certain percent of them so that they have to be resent, etc... That would be an unfair practice and something to be pretty upset about.

But, what exactly are 'Peering Points'? Are they special Verizon to Cogent connections put in place specifically to help us use Netflix? If so then shouldn't we be thanking them for having any such connections at all? Do they for some reas

Sure, but here I guess is where I don't get it. The original 'cloud' was just the old Arpanet backbone right? Commercial and other networks were connected to it, eventually leaving the original pieces in the dust and Arpanet was taken down. Those new connections were made not to benefit the whole though but rather to benefit the companies that built, paid for and maintained them right? What makes Verizon obligated to build more connections to Cogent?

Verizon provides connectivity to the Internet as a whole to end users as a paid service (They're an ISP). The connectivity their users need is to servers that are hosted on Cogent's network. The easiest way from point A to point B is to build a bridge directly (i.e. peering). The Internet (at Verizon's end) can route around this limited bandwidth by bouncing all over the country through other routes, but that's not really the best way to do it.

There is little doubt in my mind that Comcast also sabotages Netflix to my home. Broken connections are practically non-existent on my cable modem. When the service is running I very rarely have any issues. However, fire up Netflix at night and connections are routinely lost 5 minutes into the show. Traditional downloading will simultaneously be fast as ever. Netflix has a lot of enemies. I mourn for their future loss to the megaton-hammer we know as "Fscking Comcast"